Now go buy this and remind yourself of just how awesome JB could be.

I may have given Dana Stevens the business yesterday, but this line from her review of Dreamgirls is pretty terrific:

It’s a big, fat, luscious movie in which no one is tortured, murdered, or mutilated (honestly, how many recent films can you say that about?)

Man, no kiddin’! I pointed this out in my senior essay way back in, geez, 1999 I guess it was, but what started in movies like Pulp Fiction and continued through Saving Private Ryan has really grown to become the norm: the violent content and technique of horror has been well and truly mainstreamed.

The same Japanese team that took the first photographs of a live giant squid has now taken the first film of a live giant squid (a 21-footer), which they subsequently captured.

HOLY CRAP.

(Hat tip: Loren Coleman at Cryptomundo. More here.)

ToyFare Magazine has posted what may be my favorite article of any kind ever: The 10 Greatest Christmas Gifts of All Time (or at least the 1980s). If this rundown of the biggest, most eight-year-old-mind-blowing big-ticket toys ever (Castle Grayskull! All five Voltron lions! The Defiant! The AT-AT! The freaking USS Flagg G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier!!!!) doesn’t send you into an immediate nostalgia coma, I don’t know what will.

Children of Men, based on the 1992 novel by P.D. James, is the movie of the millennium because it’s about our millennium, with its fractured, fearful politics and random bursts of violence and terror. Though it’s set in the London of 2027, Cuar

We’ve been down this road before, haven’t we?

Today, I give you the mother of them all.

The Comics Journal’s Dirk Deppey reveals what you may have already noticed: Any sites (such as Where the Monsters Go) that use blo.gs as the basis for their content aggregation have gone belly-up thanks to blo.gs’s deadbeat corporate dad, Yahoo. Brighter technological minds than mine are striving to solve this problem for WtMG as we speak. They promised. You hear me, brighter technological minds?

Here’s every on-screen death from the Friday the 13th series, back to back.

And geez, is Bruce Baugh ever right when he describes fandom as constantly searching for reasons not to like things anymore.

I only very recently got into Battlestar Galactica. I’ve got about half of last night’s episode to go before I’m finally all caught up, so I’ve at long last been able to read what people have been writing about the show without fear of spoilage. And simply put, I’ve been stunned by the degree to which ostensible admirers of the show slag each then-new episode as woefully inferior to some mystical pre-lapsarian BSG era that I, for one, have been unable to identify. (See this post at Table of Malcontents (hat tip: Pop Candy), or any comment from “Sheik Yerbouti” over at The House Next Door (example).) You can see this level of intensity in the criticism of shows like The Sopranos or Lost, sure, but in those cases it’s easy enough to pinpoint the turning point: The Sopranos lost people when it stopped being about killing the big bad guy at the end of the season, and Lost lost people when they didn’t show the inside of the hatch at the end of Season One. But having watched all of BSG within the space of about a month or two, I can’t for the life of me figure out any reason for why people are apparently just dying not to like the show anymore, beyond a sort of culture-wide terror of being the last person to stop clapping.

Here: My thoughts on this past week’s installments of Justice League of America, The Spirit, X-23: Target X, Batman, Gen 13, Robin, Tales of the Unexpected, The Trials of Shazam, Ultimate X-Men, and X-Men: Phoenix–Warsong can be found at Thursday Morning Quarterback. The discussion of The Spirit is particularly interesting, I think.

There: I pat myself on the back for a couple of things I wrote over the past year over at The Horror Blog’s Horror Roundtable.

I Love Water Monsters Part One: Cryptomundo’s Loren Coleman passionately defends the existence of alligators in the NYC sewers, and tells a tale of two dueling New York Times pieces on the subject.

I Love Water Monsters Part Two: The Guardian reports on all sorts of crazy new species and phenomena (including a believed-extinct “Jurassic shrimp” and a crab so weird they had to invent a new biological family for it) being discovered in an oceanic “census” currently being conducted. (Hat tip: The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire.)

I Love Water Monsters Part Three: The BEASTS! Blog previews the upcoming art anthology from Fantagraphics, in which various luminaries from the altcomix and illustration worlds try their hand at depicting creatures of myth and legend from around the world. Needless to say, I really dug Tony Millionaire’s Leviathan:

Whoa.

Directed by Tony Gardner, this video for Daft Punk’s “The Prime Time of Your Life” is a none-too-subtle commentary on eating disorders and self-injury that is easily, easily, the most genuinely disturbing video I’ve linked to so far.

Whoa.

Hat tip: Pitchfork.

Seriously. They re-recorded the dialogue.

A one-two punch of madness from Chris Cunningham and Aphex Twin: “Come to Daddy” and “Rubber Johnny.”

“Once something hooks my interest, I tend to look for reasons to keep enjoying it, and to downplay reasons to give it up….I am very much on the lookout for things that enrich my mental landscape, and in particular for ones that hook and stir my emotions in satisfying ways. The renewing of my feelings after the year’s shocks is a big priority to me – much higher than the exercise of punching holes in things just to demonstrate that I can. It’s not exactly kindness toward the work, but it’s something like that.”

–Bruce Baugh, in a post on approaches to fandom and criticism with which I identify so strongly that I’m hesitant to do anything other than say “please go and read it”

Today’s scary clip: “Monster Hospital” by Metric. Directed by Micah Meisner, the video pays homage to some too-often overlooked sources of really striking horror imagery–that brief dream sequence at the beginning of the original Dawn of the Dead and the coming of Zuul in Ghostbusters (which works as well as both horror and science fiction as it does as a comedy and a New York City movie).

“You’re not addressing my argument, Peter. Can you refute my point with one hundred percent certainty? Because if not, then you’re wrong, and I’m right, and I win!”

–Iron Man, “Wherein I Show Why I Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Use Photoshop” (Civil War #5 parody), by Christopher Bird

Today’s scary video: “Believe” by the Chemical Brothers, directed by Dom and Nick. Imagine the video for “Owner of a Lonely Heart” crossed with a version of “Jurassic Park” that replaced the dinosaurs with industrial machinery and you’re pretty much there.

Feeling underserviced in terms of your Sean T. Collins bloviation needs? Fear not!

This week at Wizard’s Thursday Morning Quarterback comics review roundtable, I’ve got some things to say about this week’s issues of Justice Society of America, 52, Spider-Man: Reign, Detective Comics, Doctor Strange: The Oath, The Exterminators, Invincible, Ultimate Vision, and The Walking Dead.

And at The Horror Blog’s Horror Roundtable, I describe my least favorite horror experience of 2006. Sadly, it involves Udo Kier.